NDC Oslo 2015: Great & Inspiring

The NDC 2015 in Oslo was once more a blast. Two days of pre-conference workshops followed by 3 days of a content-packed conference with up to 10 parallel tracks resulted in an incredible learning opportunity. This year more than 1’900 attendees from over 50 countries attended a well-organized conference and turned it in a great event.

 

Microservices and User Stories

Sam Newman explained in the first workshop how one can (and should) implement and design microservices. They definitely should be small and understandable, what may be the biggest distinction from the widely used SOA-like services. Even when that concept is not really new, this time those services should stay small. With many small services comes the need for independent environments, which on Windows quickly result in a server per service. Until Docker arrives one has to work with the concept of immutable servers. That’s not as good as a well-designed container, but at least it may bring some ease to the maintenance and patching of the host environment.

In the second workshop Gojko Adzic explained an easy to use recipe to turn a big flat list of user stories into a value generating map of opportunities. By focusing on the output and not as most often done on the input, one can discuss results and not an endless list of things that should also be present on the input form. From there on it takes a few additional steps to turn the list into an impact map. The idea of the project GPS he presented at NDC 2013 is with such a method not that far away. We still may not exactly know where we are, but with the options it presents we have a thing that is as good as turn-by-turn navigation.

 

Security at all Levels

The keynote by Bruce Schneier explained how security in the big influences our lives and how much espionage and surveillance is going on. There is not much that is not tracked and collected, not only by the governments, but also by companies of all sorts and sizes. Unfortunately there is still the idea that one can partly weaken the strength of security, so that the good guys can spy on the bad ones. In reality the security hole doesn’t take sides and is open for everyone. How bad that can be most people can’t imagine. And patching the firmware of a light bulb is only the beginning.

Troy Hunt, Barry Dorrans and Niall Merrigan had the more practical aspects covered and explained in great detail how easy it is to hack a system. Combining the widely available tooling with the mistakes developers make and one ends up with a disaster awaiting. However, there are ways to do it better and protect your data. The even better news: It doesn’t take that much to prevent the biggest mistakes and OWASP is a good starting point.

 

Improving Agile

By now everyone is doing agile. Some more, some less. A few believe that talking 15 minutes a day with your teammates will make all the difference that is needed to fix the problems of the waterfall. Others figured out that ceremonies like a daily stand-up are not enough. Many talks pointed out where things go wrong with the agile movement and what pitfalls lure on the way to better software.

There are many approaches to make it better, but only few go as far as the GROWS Method™ by Andy Hunt. Based on how people learn skills this method goes beyond the strict rule-abiding methodologies and offers a different set of rules for different skill levels. The introduction by Andy was inspiring and I can’t wait to read more about it.

 

Great Talks

There where so many great talks that I find it impossible to pick the best session. To name just a few inspiring and powerful talks:

At the other end of the scale I have no problem to name the worst session (IMHO): “Business Logic – a different perspective” by Udi Dahan. The content would be great for a lightning talk of 10 to 15 minutes, but never should have been stretched to an hour.

 

Conclusion

I had high expectations after the last two NDC conferences. But this year’s NDC had an even better selection of talks, more great speakers and better luck with the weather at the OsloFjord cruse.
Never before was the list of talks I want to watch later growing that big and reached a two digits number before the first lunch break. To top that next year will be hard, but when one can do that, then it’s the crew around Kjersti, Jakob and Charlotte.

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